Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America

8. The Politics of Refuge: Salvadoran Refugees and International Aid in Honduras

2 0 9 Salvadoran Refugees and International Aid in Honduras Molly Todd A1983 issue of Refugees Magazine, published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), includes a photograph of a Salvadoran family resting after their arrival at a refugee reception center in Honduras. The young mother sits on the ground and leans her head, hair tousled, against the wall behind her. Her feet, bare and muddied, stretch out from under the hem of her torn dress. The father’s shirttails hang loose and gray as he wraps a blanket around one of his children. Two toddler boys stare at the camera with sad and tired eyes; the smallest boy is on the verge of tears. Behind them, a young girl buries her face in her hands. Her sister watches her cry.1 Just a few months before this photograph appeared, a Honduran newspaper published an editorial cartoon depicting a refugee camp. In the center of the drawing, a man kicks back in the shade of a palm tree. He sports a scraggly beard, a beret, hefty boots, and a contented smile. On the sand next to him rest a pistol, a rifle, and a bomb. A line of tents frames the sketch on one side, the flaps of one tent open slightly to reveal boxes of war matériel hidden inside.2 These two images purport to represent the same group of people— Salvadoran refugees in UNHCR-sponsored camps in Honduras. Yet they are The Politics of Refuge 8 2 1 0 M o l l y To d d strikingly different. In one, refugees appear as desperate and helpless victims; in the other, they are rebels who are more than willing to use violence as a means to an end. Despite this difference, at their core, the two images are the same: they present the displaced as an anomaly, an aberration in the universally accepted “national order of things.”3 Whether victims or warriors, refugees are populations that must be managed and controlled. In short, they are problems to be solved. These two images are quite representative of mainstream discourses about refugees in general. For much of the past fifty years, international policymakers , scholars, and humanitarian aid workers have tended to portray refugees not only as problems but as accessories to issues of real import: the roles of states in prompting or resolving refugee flows; the development of international law and norms relating to displaced populations and humanitarianism; and the mandates and behaviors of major organizations dedicated to protecting refugees, providing humanitarian aid, and promoting human rights. These approaches to the study of refugees stress “official” definitions and categorizations : who precisely is a legitimate refugee? To what rights and benefits is she or he entitled? As high-profile actors debate such questions in international policy circles and on the pages of scholarly journals, refugee bodies become sites of transnational struggle. Perhaps ironically, displaced populations rarely, if ever, are party to these debates. Indeed, the high-profile participants tend to consider refugees incapable of meaningful engagement because their “judgment and reason ha[ve] been compromised by [their] experiences” of violence that typically accompany displacement. In other words, separation from their national communities renders refugees “no longer trustworthy as ‘honest citizens.’”4 Consequently , they must be managed, deciphered, and healed only by professionals. This Central American case study turns the study of refugee crises on its head by allowing refugees to interpret and represent themselves and by placing their voices at the center of the debate. More specifically, it examines the case of Salvadoran campesinos who sought exile in Honduras during the dirty and civil wars of the 1970s through the early 1990s. Documentation produced in the refugee camps, oral history interviews, and internal records of the UNHCR reveal that, although excluded from official decision-making circles, refugees found alternative ways of entering conversations and affecting policy. First, I outline the official debate by examining how Honduran and UN officials “imagined” the refugees and represented them before national and international publics. I then examine how refugees’ own imaginings challenged official representations. This ground-up perspective offers crucial insights into how campesino refugees constructed political identities and how their trans- T h e P o l i t i c s o f R e f u g e 2 1 1 national experiences influenced their understandings of themselves and their roles in Salvadoran affairs. Imagining Refugees By...